Duma Key, Page 40

  If Elizabeth recognized this, she gave no indication. I pushed her slowly up the line as the ship bulked larger and closer, its black masts looming like fingers, its sails sagging like dead flesh. The furnace sky glared through the holes in the canvas. Now the name on the transom was PERSE. There might have been more--there was room for more--but if so, it was hidden by shadows. In Girl and Ship No. 6 (the ship now looming over the rowboat), the little girl was wearing what appeared to be a blue singlet with a yellow stripe around the neck. Her hair in that one was orange-ish; it was the only Rowboat Girl whose identity I wasn't sure of. Maybe it was Ilse, since the others were . . . but I wasn't entirely convinced. In this one the first few rose-petals had begun to appear on the water (plus one single yellow-green tennis ball with the letters DUNL visible on it), and an odd assortment of geegaws were heaped on deck: a tall mirror (which, reflecting the sunset, appeared filled with blood), a child's rocking horse, a steamer trunk, a pile of shoes. These same objects appeared in No. 7 and No. 8, where they had been joined by several others--a young girl's bicycle leaning against the foremast, a pile of tires stacked on the stern, a great hourglass at midships. This last also reflected the sun and appeared to be full of blood instead of sand. In Girl and Ship No. 8 there were more rose-petals floating between the rowboat and the Perse. There were more tennis balls, too, at least half a dozen. And a rotting garland of flowers hung around the neck of the rocking horse. I could almost smell the stench of their perfume on the still air.

  "Dear God," Elizabeth whispered. "She has grown so strong." There had been color in her face but now it was all gone. She didn't look eighty-five; she looked two hundred.

  Who? I tried to ask, but nothing came out.

  "Ma'am . . . Miss Eastlake . . . you shouldn't tax yourself," Pam said.

  I cleared my throat. "Can you get her a glass of water?"

  "I will, Dad," Illy said.

  Elizabeth was still staring at Girl and Ship No. 8. "How many of those . . . those souvenirs . . . do you recognize?" she asked.

  "I don't . . . my imagination . . ." I fell silent. The girl in the rowboat of No. 8 was no souvenir, but she was Ilse. The green dress, with its bare back and crisscrossing straps, had seemed jarringly sexy for a little girl, but now I knew why: it was a dress Ilse had bought recently, from a mail-order catalogue, and Ilse was no longer a little girl. Otherwise, the tennis balls were still a mystery to me, the mirror meant nothing, nor did the stack of tires. And I didn't know for a fact that the bicycle leaning against the foremast had been Tina Garibaldi's, but I feared it . . . and my heart was somehow sure of it.

  Elizabeth's hand, dreadfully cold, settled on my wrist. "There's no bullet on the frame of this last one."

  "I don't know what you're--"

  Her grip tightened. "You do. You know exactly what I mean. The show is a sell, Edgar, do you think I'm blind? A bullet on the frame of every painting we've looked at--including No. 6, the one with my sister Adie in the rowboat--but not this one!"

  I looked back toward No. 6, where Rowboat Girl had orange hair. "That's your sister?"

  She paid no attention. I don't think she even heard me. All her attention was bent upon Girl and Ship No. 8. "What do you mean to do? Take it back? Do you mean to take it back to Duma?" Her voice rang out in the quiet of the gallery.

  "Ma'am . . . Miss Eastlake . . . you really shouldn't excite yourself this way," Pam said.

  Elizabeth's eyes blazed in the hanging flesh of her face. Her nails dug into the scant meat of my wrist. "And what? Put it next to another one you've already started?"

  "I haven't started another--" Or had I? My memory was playing me again, as it often did in moments of stress. If someone had at that moment demanded that I speak the name of my older daughter's French boyfriend, I probably would have said Rene. As in Magritte. The dream had tilted, all right; here was the nightmare, right on schedule.

  "The one where the rowboat is empty?"

  Before I could say anything, Gene Hadlock shoved through the crowd, followed by Wireman, followed by Ilse, holding a glass of water.

  "Elizabeth, we should go," Hadlock said.

  He reached for her arm. Elizabeth swept his hand away. On the follow-through she struck the glass Ilse was starting to proffer and it went flying, hitting one of the bare walls and shattering. Someone cried out and some woman, incredibly, laughed.

  "Do you see the rocking horse, Edgar?" She held out her hand. It was trembling badly. Her nails had been painted coral pink, probably by Annmarie. "That belonged to my sisters, Tessie and Laura. They loved it. They dragged that damned thing with them everywhere. It was outside Rampopo--the baby playhouse on the side lawn--after they drowned. My father couldn't bear to look at it. He had it thrown into the water at the memorial service. Along with the garland, of course. The one around the horse's neck."

  Silence except for the tearing rasp of her breath. Mary Ire staring with big eyes, her obsessive note-taking at an end, the pad hanging forgotten in one hand by her side. Her other hand had gone to her mouth. Then Wireman pointed to a door that was quite cleverly concealed in more of the brown burlappy stuff. Hadlock nodded. And suddenly Jack was there, and it was actually Jack who took charge. "Have you out in a jiff, Miz Eastlake," he said. "No worries." He seized the handles of her wheelchair.

  "Look at the ship's wake!" Elizabeth shouted at me as she was borne out of the public eye for the last time. "For Christ's sake, don't you see what you've painted?"

  I looked. So did my family.

  "There's nothing there," Melinda said. She looked mistrustfully toward the office door, which was just closing behind Jack and Elizabeth. "Is she dotty, or what?"

  Illy was standing on tiptoe, craning for a closer look. "Daddy," she said hesitantly. "Are those faces? Faces in the water?"

  "No," I said, surprised at the steadiness of my own voice. "All you're seeing is an idea she put in your head. Will you guys excuse me for a minute?"

  "Of course," Pam said.

  "May I be of assistance, Edgar?" Kamen asked in his booming basso.

  I smiled. I was surprised at how easily that came, too. Shock has its purposes, it seems. "Thanks, but no. Her doctor's in with her."

  I hurried toward the office door, resisting an urge to look back. Melinda hadn't seen it; Ilse had. My guess was that not many people would, even if it were pointed out to them . . . and even then, most would dismiss it as either coincidence or a small artistic wink.

  Those faces.

  Those screaming drowned faces in the ship's sunset wake.

  Tessie and Laura were there, most certainly, but others as well, just below them where the red faded to green and the green to black.

  One might be a carrot-topped girl in an old-fashioned singlet-style bathing suit: Elizabeth's oldest sister, Adriana.

  vii

  Wireman was giving her sips of what looked like Perrier while Rosenblatt fussed at her side, literally wringing his hands. The office seemed packed with people. It was hotter than the gallery, and getting hotter.

  "I want you all out!" Hadlock said. "Everyone but Wireman! Now! Right now!"

  Elizabeth pushed aside the glass with the back of her hand. "Edgar," she said in a husky voice. "Edgar stays."

  "No, Edgar goes," Hadlock said. "You've excited yourself quite en--"

  His hand was in front of her. She seized it and squeezed it. With some force, it seemed, because Hadlock's eyes widened.

  "Stays." It was only a whisper, but a powerful one.

  People began to leave. I heard Dario telling the crowd gathered outside that everything was fine, Miss Eastlake felt a little faint but her doctor was with her and she was recovering. Jack was going out the door when Elizabeth called, "Young man!" He turned.

  "Don't forget," she told him.

  He gave her a brief grin and knocked off a salute. "No, ma'am, I sure won't."

  "I should have trusted you in the first place," she said, and Jack went out. Then, in a lower voice, as if her str
ength were fading: "He's a good boy."

  "Trusted him for what?" Wireman asked her.

  "To search the attic for a certain picnic basket," she said. "In the picture on the landing, Nan Melda is holding it." She looked at me reproachfully.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I remember you telling me, but I just . . . I got painting, and . . ."

  "I don't blame you," she said. Her eyes had receded deep in their sockets. "I should have known. It's her power. The same power that drew you here in the first place." She looked at Wireman. "And you."

  "Elizabeth, that's enough," Hadlock said. "I want to take you to the hospital and run some tests. Run some fluids into you while I'm at it. Get you some rest--"

  "I'll be getting all the rest I need very soon now," she told him, and smiled. The smile exposed a large and rather gruesome ring of dentures. Her eyes returned to me. "Trixie pixie nixie," she said. "To her it's all a game. All our sorrow. And she's awake again." Her hand, very cold, settled on my forearm. "Edgar, she's awake!"

  "Who? Elizabeth, who? Perse?"

  She shuddered backward in her chair. It was as if an electrical current were passing through her. The hand on my arm tightened. Her coral nails punched through my skin, leaving a quartet of red crescents. Her mouth opened, exposing her teeth this time in a snarl instead of a smile. Her head went backward and I heard something in there snap.

  "Catch the chair before it goes over!" Wireman roared, but I couldn't--I had only one arm, and Elizabeth was clutching it. Was docked in it.

  Hadlock grabbed one of the push-handles and the chair skittered sideways instead of toppling backwards. It struck Jimmy Yoshida's desk. Now Elizabeth was in full seizure mode, jittering back and forth in her chair like a puppet. The snood came loose from her hair and flailed, sparkling, in the light of the overhead fluorescents. Her feet jerked and one of her scarlet pumps went flying off. The angels want to wear my red shoes, I thought, and as if the line had summoned it, blood burst from her nose and mouth.

  "Hold her!" Hadlock shouted, and Wireman threw himself across the arms of the chair.

  She did this, I thought coldly. Perse. Whoever she is.

  "I've got her!" Wireman said. "Call 911, doc, for Christ's sake!"

  Hadlock hurried around the desk, picked up the phone, dialed, listened. "Fuck! I just get more dial-tone!"

  I snatched it from him. "You must have to dial 9 for an outside line," I said, and did it with the phone cradled between my ear and shoulder. And when the calm-voiced woman on the other end asked me the nature of my emergency, I was able to tell her. It was the address I couldn't remember. I couldn't even remember the name of the gallery.

  I handed the phone to Hadlock and went back around the desk to Wireman.

  "Christ Jesus," he said. "I knew we shouldn't have brought her, I knew . . . but she was so fucking insistent."

  "Is she out?" I looked at her, slumped in her chair. Her eyes were open, but they looked vacantly at a point in the far corner. "Elizabeth?" There was no response.

  "Was it a stroke?" Wireman asked. "I never knew they could be so violent."

  "That was no stroke. Something shut her up. Go to the hospital with her--"

  "Of course I'll--"

  "And if she says anything else, listen."

  Hadlock came back. "They're waiting for her at the hospital. An ambulance will be here any minute." He stared hard at Wireman, and then his look softened. "Oh, all right," he said.

  "Oh all right?" Wireman asked. "What does that mean, oh all right?"

  "It means if something like this was going to happen," Hadlock said, "where do you think she would have wanted it to happen? At home in bed, or in one of the galleries where she spent so many happy days and nights?"

  Wireman took in a deep, shaky breath, let it out, nodded, then knelt beside her and began to brush at her hair. Elizabeth's face was patchy-red in places, and bloated, as if she were having an extreme allergic reaction.

  Hadlock bent and tilted her head back, trying to ease her terrible rasping. Not long after, we heard the approaching warble of the ambulance.

  viii

  The show dragged on and I stuck it out, partly because of all the effort Dario, Jimmy, and Alice had put into the thing, but mostly for Elizabeth. I thought it was what she would have wanted. My moment in the sun, she'd called it.

  I didn't go to the celebratory dinner afterwards, though. I made my excuses, then sent Pam and the girls on with Kamen, Kathi, and some others from Minneapolis. Watching them pull away, I realized I hadn't made arrangements for a ride to the hospital. While I was standing there in front of the gallery, wondering if Alice Aucoin had left yet, a beat-to-shit old Mercedes pulled up beside me, and the passenger window slid down.

  "Get in," Mary Ire said. "If you're going to Sarasota Memorial, I'll drop you off." She saw me hesitate and smiled crookedly. "Mary's had very little to drink tonight, I assure you, and in any case, the Sarasota traffic goes from clogged to almost zero after ten PM--the old folks take their Scotch and Prozac and then curl up to watch Bill O'Reilly on TiVo."

  I got in. The door clunked when it shut, and for one alarming moment I thought my ass was going to keep descending until it was actually on Palm Avenue. Finally my downward motion stopped. "Listen, Edgar," she said, then hesitated. "Can I still call you Edgar?"

  "Of course."

  She nodded. "Lovely. I couldn't remember with perfect clarity what sort of terms we parted on. Sometimes when I drink too much . . ." She shrugged her bony shoulders.

  "We're fine," I said.

  "Good. As for Elizabeth . . . not so good. Is it?"

  I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. The streets were almost deserted, as promised. The sidewalks were dead empty.

  "She and Jake Rosenblatt were a thing for awhile. It was pretty serious."

  "What happened?"

  Mary shrugged. "Can't say for sure. If you forced me to guess, I'd say that in the end she was just too used to being her own mistress to be anyone else's. Other than on a part-time basis, that is. But Jake never got over her."

  I remembered him saying Fuck the rules, Miss Eastlake! and wondered what he had called her in bed. Surely not Miss Eastlake. It was a sad and useless bit of speculation.

  "Maybe this is for the best," Mary said. "She was guttering. If you'd known her in her prime, Edgar, you'd know she wasn't the sort of woman who'd want to go out that way."

  "I wish I had known her in her prime."

  "Can I do anything for your family?"

  "No," I said. "They're having dinner with Dario and Jimmy and the whole state of Minnesota. I'll join them later if I can--maybe for dessert--and I'm booked into the Ritz, where they're all staying. If nothing else, I'll see them in the morning."

  "That's nice. They seemed nice. And understanding."

  Pam actually seemed more understanding now than before the divorce. Of course now I was down here painting and not up there yelling at her. Or trying to staff her with a butter-fife.

  "I'm going to praise your show to the skies, Edgar. I doubt if that means much to you tonight, but perhaps it will later on. The paintings are just extraordinary."

  "Thank you."

  Ahead, the lights of the hospital were twinkling in the dark. There was a Waffle House right next door. It was probably good business for the cardiac unit.

  "Will you give Libby my love, if she's in any condition to take note of such things?"

  "Sure."

  "And I have something for you. It's in the glove compartment. Manila envelope. I was going to use it to bait the hook for a follow-up interview, but fuck it."

  I had some problems with the old car's glove compartment button, but finally the little door fell open like a corpse's mouth. There was a lot more than a manila envelope in there--a geologist could have taken core-samples probably going back to 1965--but the envelope was in front, and it had my name printed on it.

  As she pulled up in front of the hospital, in a spot marked 5 MINUTES PICK-UP AND
DROP-OFF, Mary said: "Prepare to be amazed. I was. An old copy-editor friend of mine chased that down for me--she's older than Libby, but still sharp."

  I bent back the clasps and slid out two Xeroxed sheets of an ancient newspaper story. "That," Mary said, "is from the Port Charlotte Weekly Echo. June of 1925. It's got to be the story my friend Aggie saw, and the reason I could never find it is because I never looked as far south as Port Charlotte. Also, the Weekly Echo gave up the ghost in 1931."

  The streetlight beneath which she'd parked wasn't good enough for the fine print, but I could read the headline and see the picture. I looked for a long time.

  "It means something to you, doesn't it?" she asked.

  "Yes. I just don't know what."

  "If you figure it out, will you tell me?"

  "All right," I said. "You might even believe it. But Mary . . . this is one story you'll never print. Thanks for the ride. And thanks for coming to my show."

  "Both my pleasure. Remember to give Libby my love."

  "I will."

  But I never did. I had seen Elizabeth Eastlake for the last time.

  ix

  The ICU nurse on duty told me that Elizabeth was in surgery. When I asked for what, she told me she wasn't sure. I looked around the waiting room.

  "If you're looking for Mr. Wireman, I believe he went to the cafeteria for coffee," the nurse said. "That's on the fourth floor."

  "Thanks." I started away, then turned back. "Is Dr. Hadlock part of the surgical team?"

  "I don't think so," she said, "but he's observing."

  I thanked her again and went in search of Wireman. I found him in a far corner of the caff, sitting in front of a paper cup about the size of a World War II mortar shell. Except for a scattering of nurses and orderlies and one tense-looking family group in another corner of the room, we had the place to ourselves. Most of the chairs were upended on the tables, and a tired-looking lady in red rayon was working out with a mop. An iPod hung in a sling between her breasts.

  "Hola, mi vato," Wireman said, and gave me a wan smile. His hair, neatly combed back when he made his entrance with Elizabeth and Jack, had fallen down around his ears, and there were dark circles around his eyes. "Why don't you grab yourself a cup of coffee? It tastes like factory-made shit, but it do prop up a person's eyelids."